UPCOMING EVENTS

Virtual reality is an incredible technology that can whisk you away from your life, but it doesn’t make the things in your life actually vanish. And sometimes that might mean you’re going to sit on your cat.

Above: Good kitty!

I sat on my cat because of VR, but thankfully some developers are already working on a tool to address this awful problem. Katie Goode, the creative director of developer Triangular Pixels, has built a kind of harness for her cat that uses one of HTC’s dedicated trackers. The tracker is a tiny, crown-looking device that you can attach to a mug, a toy gun, or any other object you may wish to see while you’re inside virtual reality. In Goode’s case, she wanted to see when her cat decided to randomly take a nap in the middle of her room-scale VR space, and so she stitched together what looks like a tiny (and adorable) backpack for her pet.

The result is that anyone wearing the VR headset can now see when the animal comes into the room.

“It’s a two part project, one part code and another craft,” Goode wrote in a blog post. “The aim is to give players a warning of unpredictable pets/children when they enter the space, and the potential to of course – actually see their companion in games.”